Terry Crews Interview

Terry Crews Used To Be Incredibly Scrawny. Then Football Happened.

The job of carrying the big, blasting, fully automatic shotgun in The Expendables had to go to the dude with the biggest muscles. Being the biggest guy on a movie starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham and Arnold Schwarzenegger is no easy feat. Enter former NFLer Terry Crews.

But Crews wasn’t always big and bad-ass. It was a journey that began with a desire to escape his hometown.

“I was a skinny kid,” Terry said, “but I wanted to be strong. My dream was to be a superhero. I used to pick up couches and jump off roofs and bust my head — I was that kind of guy. In all my early photos you see me flexing.”

But his mom held him back from football at first, and with good reason.

“I began to play football when I was 14,” he said. “My mother would never let me play earlier than that because my grades weren’t there. When I got them up she let me play and it was my way out of Flint, Michigan.”

Why football? Because it was about being strong. “I always liked lifting weights and I liked having muscles. When I was a kid I ordered those books from the back of the comic book that said, ‘Are you tired of getting sand kicked in your face?’” I remember those ads. Charles Atlas. I think.

“I knew football was going to make me stronger,” Crews said.

And it was the lessons learned in football that got Terry ready for his career in acting.

“Football helped prepare me for my career in acting because you learn how to deal with rejection,” he said. “I learned how to learn something, to do something, and to improve. I learned how to go from a losing team to a winning team, how to go from one level to the next.” And how did that transfer over into acting? “I had never been an actor, but I learned that if I applied myself and worked at it that I would eventually get better.”

And it’s allowed him to be a range of characters. “There is not one character that I’ve done that does not have a piece of me in it. I can be badass. I can be goofy. I can be whatever. I go the whole range.”

But when it comes to being big and badass, Terry needs to lift heavy stuff to get the look.

“I do a lot of Olympic-style lifting now,” he said. “That changed my life. I moved from football-oriented exercises into more Olympic-style stuff. When I was working on The 6th Day [starring Arnold Schwarzenegger] in Vancouver there was a trainer who taught me how to properly do power cleans and lunges and squats that are really explosive, and it really changed the way I lift towards lots of power in the movements, and I still do that to this day. I was doing deadlifts this morning. It’s really about the core and how powerful your back is, because that’s your center. I work from the inside out. The arms and legs and everything come from that core.”

I know a lot of lifters who hate running, and even proclaim it as worthless. But Terry feels the love for being rapidly bipedal.